Mindless Ones

‘Nothing of note was to be inherited by her loved ones, and nor was anything ever expected to be. She was put to rest with exactly the same title as the one with which she was born. She never ruined anyone’s life and never once considered a career in the deliberate, violent immiseration of her fellow citizens.’

‘One measures a circle, beginning anywhere’ – From Hell

‘Easily the current century’s first landmark work of fantasy and ranking amongst the best pieces ever written in that genre, with The Vorrh we are presented with a sprawling immaterial organism which leaves the reader filthy with its seeds and spores’

‘I would say, that if you’re talking about a line of progress, if it can be called progress, that runs from Berthold Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, to Donald Cammell’s Performance, to Harry Potter, I don’t think you can really see that as anything but a decline… and also I would say that if you’ve got the Avengers movie as one of the most eagerly attended recent movies, and if most of those attendees were adults, which I believe they were, then if you’ve got a huge number of contemporary adults going to watch a film containing characters and storylines that were meant for the entertainment of eleven year old boys fifty years ago, then…’

‘We shall attack, we continue to wait… This gesture, which can never be fully grounded in reasons, is that of a Master. It is for the experts to present the situation in its complexity, and it is for the Master to simplify it into a point of decision. … The Master is needed especially in situations of deep crisis.’

‘BOMB ENTANGLERS DISENGAGED’

Sometimes, plans change…

When I was planning this entry, it was all going to be about how this is the story in which two figures who will be important to this narrative from now on enter — Douglas Adams, whose first story this is, and who would go on to write two more and script edit the next series, and me, because I was born two days before episode two of this story aired. So from now on, the entries will be slightly more personal, as I will remember at least some of them from the time of broadcast.

But instead of being about people entering the story, it has to be about people leaving it.